lol, in the great 2003 aircon disaster, we were calling the lab I worked in 'Death Valley' and a thermograph recorded 48C. The servers etc. lived, but developers were wiltiing badly. Even the bosses were in shorts and t's :)
I'm afraid the answer is to have another Teams. Otherwise, the argument between technical (main) and company (meta) could be expanded to bigger demand, like each department (finance? marketing? hr?). If it's public for all employees, then tagging system should be sufficient.
And I'm honestly still not sure the scope of SOfT. Is it only for technical? Is it even okay for non-technical e.g. financial/HR related?
I don't think so. After looking that pricing page once again, I see Teams as an entry level for Enterprise when you only need a single Q&A. But if you need 2 or more, you have to choose between multiple independent Teams (e.g. Acme for IT, Acme for HR) or choose (migrate to?) Enterprise instead.
So... how many companies will wind up with an elite team able to participate in their internal Q&A powered by SE plus an elaborate process (six to eight weeks of paperwork) for getting pleb employees' questions onto that site?
IMO, "Meta" in Teams is meaningless, because that's just a label, not a purpose. Other Teams can even use Meta for everything else except meta discussion.
That's why, why don't facilitate the tagging system? Use meta, or even better... fun or team-building or... you get the idea. You're free to "abuse" the tagging system on your own Q&A site!
I have explained my reasoning from my point of view ("meta" is just a label -> you get 2 Q&A sites for 1 product), but I guess you disagree with me... (it's fine, I agree to disagree)
@Mr_Green there have been two mostly-different products offered under the "Stack Overflow Enterprise" name. The first one was a fork of the Stack Exchange 1.0 codebase (think: Area51) and was sold and supported by Fog Creek if you contacted us and we didn't manage to talk you out of it.
...we tried pretty hard to talk you out of it...
The current version is essentially the same codebase that is live on Stack Overflow, with the addition of some SSO and user-management features
It's pretty nice. And we don't try nearly as hard to talk people out of buying it.
Intra-company chat is a dodgy thing in any case, and Slack seems to have tied up the market for it pretty well
Given Teams are aimed at ~10-50 user setups, a meta site is overkill
Think... The smallest of the small Stack Exchange sites, and consider how less complicated they'd be if we eschewed separate metas for a "meta" tag on the main site.
if you get 1 question a day and 1 meta-question a week, you're not exactly drowning in noise
(we actually talked about doing this for small SE sites years ago, and then... Couldn't. But it's still a good idea.)
Heck... Channels (the functionality on which the Teams product is built) would be a better solution than our current separate meta sites for most SE sites
We modeled per-site metas on MSE (which at the time was MSO, the shared trilogy meta) - which got a LOT of traffic. But most sites only need a little bit of meta discussion.
@Mr_Green it will be interesting to see the extent to which rep on teams is a help or a hindrance
You could have a way to flag a question as a meta question and set it apart with a different background color and an easy way to find them all... it'd be like a special tag ... a literal "Meta" tag. :D
It wouldn't require a different section of the site, the way we do with child metas, but they'd get some special treatment.
... which is, I guess, what you already said... though, I couldn't imagine doing it on an actual site. I think it'd be really confusing for users who just walked in off the internet.
I don't know whether to take your engagement with twitter.com/aprilwensel/status/992071592166371330 as an indication that it's an idea you're considering, @TimPost, but... for goodness' sake don't ban everyone that doesn't express agreement for some ideological document y'all come up with, especially if it's a load of vague feminism devoid of specific requirements like Jay's original blog post was.
We do need to put the be nice policy more out front when people sign up, and I think we need to call it more officially a code of conduct. That's definitely true.
A large fraction of my total contribution to Stack Overflow is pointing out errors in answers, frequently with explicitly -1s in the comments, and essentially never in what April Wensel would consider to be a "kind" tone, and I worry about hundreds of hours of work I've done going up in smoke
I know you do, Shog - and I disagree with you, as I've said before on Meta, and used the leeway that the limited -1 ban allows to go against your wishes as much as possible
"Line 13 is just plain wrong, you need to deliberately dereference there, type-punning breaks strict platforms" -- nothing wrong there. Not rude. Not condescending. "Only an idiot would dereference a type-punned pointer and expect it to work on strict platforms" -- condescending asshat answer.
I think that letting a downvoted user know what motivated the downvote is the respectful thing to do, and if I'm commenting to point out an error that it's useful to have noted anyway, then I throw in the -1
> -1 this is nonsense. It's perfectly legal to have two columns with primary_key=True in an SQLAlchemy model (although as @ChrisJohnson notes, this creates a compound primary key, not "two primary keys") and that was not the cause of the error here. – Mark Amery Apr 15 at 14:10
"There is nothing factually correct" makes me feel like I'm being addressed as a programmer. "This is nonsense" makes me feel like i'm being addressed as a nursery school child.
Exactly, it's like pushing a button. Clicking downvote harder doesn't reinforce your point any better than saying words like 'nonsense'. It just makes people (and human interface devices) feel bad.
But @MarkAmery Honestly, if your example was the worst that people would see, I'd say we were doing a pretty damn good job of keeping things civil and welcoming. It wasn't 'nonsense' that provoked us into writing that post.
Right, but is it or is it not comfortably within the boundaries of what our new standard of "kindness" should permit to exist on the site, as you personally understand them?
Nobody's really tried to articulate what that standard is yet
hey don't call that nonsense, that was unnecessary!well okay but it's still rubbishhey don't call that rubbish, that was unnecessary!stop calling my rubbish unnecessary, what do you know about my rubbish?NONSENSE, this isn't about your rubbish and isn't necessary at allwell now we agree on something, was that really necessary?
^^^ If that was the worst of it, we wouldn't be so concerned.
But when we get stuff like "stupid indian scum!" and "wow ur hot where u live?" .... and even when that vanishes in 5 minutes or less, it's still visible to a vast quantity of people for a short time. So we need to look at the culture.
- Most of us struggle to express criticism in a way that is going to be palatable to the person being criticized much less 3rd-party readers. That's something we can all probably learn to get better at, but it ain't going to be like flipping a light switch, and there's a grey area on most of it big enough to hide an elephant. The best we can do is probably going to be providing learning material for critics and... just not keeping comments around forever.
- There is an awful lot of overtly rude / offensive stuff that just doesn't get deleted because there are lots of comments and fewer people flagging them. We can almost certainly get rid of THAT more effectively.
it is hard not to be antagonistic and critical towards a post that I think is useless and completely wrong, Tim. Quibbling over the right tone ultimately doesn't change the fact that being told that your work is bad is upsetting, whether it's true or false, no matter what the tone is. It upsets me when I'm on the receiving end. It's tempeting to blame tone and think the critic is being a dick; the mass of different standards of politeness means you can always make that argument
I've been wondering if there's some sentiment that flagging comments is ineffective. I had a brief interchange with someone on Twitter last night where they were aware of flagging but seemed to think that the end result was negligible, even if the comment was deleted because the moderators may not see the flag, particularly in the case of questions being deleted before the flags were handled.
@Shog9 "not keeping comments around forever" - I think there are a lot of comments that it's important to keep around forever. Comments are often the only reasonable way to point out that answers are wrong, and that is information that should be preserved
I don't flag comments either, but then again I don't get to see the kind of comments Tim uses as an example of the appalling stuff that supposedly needs to get deleted faster.
If someone feels that the wording of a comment is not nice, they can always replace it with their own. Getting rid of a problematic comment doesn't mean the information it contains can't be replaced.
and then we can go around in circles rewriting comments over and over according to our own personal standards of politeness, @Catija, quite possibly losing nuance and accuracy along the way. Or just lose the comment when someone flags it without bothering to replace it, which seems more likely.
@MarkAmery this ties into a huge set of concerns regarding not just wrong answers but obsolete, insecure or otherwise-harmful solutions. Which we know from experience and at least one formal study aren't effectively mitigated by comments pointing out the problem.
Proposal
For Stack Overflow, I suggest the following modification:
For the first X days of a post's existence, comments are displayed as they are now. X should be set based on the number of days an open question is likely to be active on the site.
After X days, all comments associated with ...
I doubt that mods will go around rewriting slightly unkind comments on behalf of their posters - and if they go around deleting them, we'll lose useful information
The mods don't have to do all the work... the person who flagged the comment can easily add the same information in kinder wording and explain that in the flag.
That's fair, @Shog9 - and I'd love to see more effective tooling for addressing bad answers. It just definitely shouldn't come at the price of putting the torch to the existing knowledge we've accumulated in the comments.
Plenty of answers get critical errors pointed out years after they're posted; any policy that involves those comments disappearing may mean waiting years again to rediscover the destroyed knowledge
@Catija that raises an issue of authorship. Also, reposting someone's content before it's gone will likely be perceived as hostile (hey everyone, foo's comment is unkind and will get deleted)
> -1 this is nonsense. It's perfectly legal to have two columns with primary_key=True in an SQLAlchemy model (although as @ChrisJohnson notes, this creates a compound primary key, not "two primary keys") and that was not the cause of the error here. – Mark Amery Apr 15 at 14:10
Both Shog and Tim pointed out that "This is nonsense" is unnecessary in that comment and can be construed as rude.
@MarkAmery one of the ideas that's been suggested in the past is a sort of "talk" system akin to what's on Wikipedia - a way to document and discuss errata "out of band" with an eye toward eventual correction or at least inline annotation. The big advantage of this, IMHO, is that it gets rid of the false sense of being "done" when a problem is identified in a comment.
I start to think that someday SE will need to add a flag for comment, like insult, as rude leave too much place to interpretation. maybe CM could monitor that flag
@MarkAmery if the answer is useful as a demonstration of what not to do, then keeping it around is probably worthwhile. Otherwise... There are infinite non-solutions to any problem; do we need to enumerate them for eternity?
My favorite approach has always been an answer that explains why the solution presented in a previous answer is seductive but harmful. And, ideally, ranks higher than the cited answer.
no, I don't think "we" need to - but "we" are not a single consciousness. An individual posts an answer that is flat out wrong. I downvote it and point out the error. Some other people downvote. The author sticks by it, and some people upvote the answer because, though unfixably flawed, it works for them in their special case. What now?
my critical comment remains visible and new readers can see it, but I and those who agree with my don't have the power to overrule the other side and totally purge content that we believe is incorrect
@Catija Perhaps you mean, in a way you hope nobody, anywhere, will consider rude -ever. Because if a comment gets flagged, regardless of that flag's validity, the comment is almost always removed... because it's just easier from a moderation standpoint.
@Shog9 I think "why do we need to keep around answers that are wrong" is a question rather similar to "what's the point of freedom of speech for wrong ideas; why don't we only allow free expression of ideas that are right"
it's because people disagree, and keeping contentious answers visible is necessary for that disagreement to play out
@JonEricson sorry, I just finally got round to reading your post after being distracted by the back-and-forth here. I think that, for my use case (commenting on why answers are wrong) the problem is with this :_"If you really want to preserve some information, be sure to put it into the body of a post."_
> Interestingly, we see the opposite behavior with regard to warnings: Snippets that have been commented with security warnings are copied more often into applications than those without.
if my issue is that an answer is completely wrong, and I comment to demonstrate that... then I still can't reasonably edit that information into the answer
@JonEricson The only way I could do that is to just put a disclaimer at the top saying "BTW this answer is totally wrong for [reasons], completely disregard what follows"
@Shog9 I'd support it too - with the caveats that 1) I think comments still do a decent job and are dramatically better than nothing, and 2) even if we do build a better system, we should absolutely not destroy the old information in the comments
The problem with comments is that they have no single, well-defined or well-supported purpose. They literally exist to keep stuff out of answers - they were created for that specific goal; that they're used as a way of suggesting improvements, pointing out errors, critiquing solutions, soapbox preaching to casual readers and tangential discussions... Means it is almost impossible to fix problems with any one use without making them less suitable for another.
@JonEricson stackoverflow.com/q/12083605/1709587 has 29 answers. All except mine are wrong, and a while back I went through and commented to point out the errors in every single one of them. Should I include 28 addendums to my answer?
And then keep them up to date as answers get deleted?
@MarkAmery It's hard for me to see what's wrong there. Yours is the top voted and accepted answer. (It's also very detailed.) Most people won't ever read the others, much less the comments.
I'm 100% convinced the current code of conduct needs zero change - but if you find a way to make it better enforced, I'm all ears. The second issue - comments aren't a good way to deal with incorrect answers - I'm all ears too.
@JonEricson the problem is that precisely because my answer is long-as-fuck ("very detailed" in a nice way to say that, thanks), lots of people will think "wow, this is long and ugly" and skip by it for a more succinct solution
Proposal
For Stack Overflow, I suggest the following modification:
For the first X days of a post's existence, comments are displayed as they are now. X should be set based on the number of days an open question is likely to be active on the site.
After X days, all comments associated with ...
